Wednesday Moment of Zen: Another Kind of Strata

Of all the entries from New Blood 2010, the annual exhibition of the most innovative work from recent art and design graduates in the UK, my hands-down favorite is Gemma Dutfield’s A Geological Time Scale Book. I don’t have much information on the piece, other than the fact that Dutfield just received her BA in graphic design from Staffordshire University.

But it’s wonderfully evocative. Imagine your own, with the first book you ever loved at the bottom, picture-book bedrock, and all the literature that has formed you as a reader accreting upward—a kind of 3-D #booksthatchangedmyworld. Would there be periods of violent upheaval—say, around age 19 and again at 35? Would your once-beloved authors be fossilized at points throughout? Would some writers be veins of pure gleaming quartz in your reading life, erupting in crystals here and there?